| The use of filters in colour photography tends to be for the correction of colour temperature. Normal "daylight" film is tuned to respond to a colour temperature of around 5500 degrees Kelvin (which equates to midday in Washington on the longest day if my memory serves me right). If you were in this situation, you shouldn't need any correction filters.
Indoor lighting (although it looks "white" to our eyes) is not white as far as the film is concerned. Tungsten filament lamps have a temperature of around 3200 degrees Kelvin, so you can see that there will be a difference of 2300 Kelvin. To correct this situation, you would use a "tungsten to daylight conversion" filter (normally called 80a/b/c). Flourescent indoor lighting has a different temperature again, and yet another filter (FL/Day) would be required. The same applies to mercury and sodium (street) lamps.
Of course, there are (or were) tungsten tuned films which, if you used indoors needed little or no correction, but if you took them outdoors, the resulting blue cast would be horrendous.
Many of the casts on your print film can be partially removed during printing, but it's better to do the correction at the taking stage because the relationships of the other colours is retained. If you try to filter our casts during printing, you affect all the other colours too.......and usually with poor results.
The filters used in B&W photography are used to modify the response of panchromatic (sensitive to most colours) film. The normal filters (yellow, green, orange, red) will cut back on the transmission of their complimentary colours, so example a red filter will cut the amount of blue getting through to the film, thereby underexposing it and making a blue sky darker.
Mike | 
